Month: August 2015

The Faustian pact – we all know what it means. The idea of selling your soul to the devil in return for great wealth and power holds a powerful grip on the imagination; it can be applied to all kinds of dubious bargains, the whiff of danger adding excitement to the fantastic amount of money/power/enjoyment you expect to get out of the deal. How can that not make a good story?

To celebrate the imminent publication of The Tragickall History of Henry Fowst, here are five top devilish pacts in literature:

To begin at the beginning… the Bible. You expected Marlowe, didn’t you? Nope. God got there first. The Book of Job is the story of a good, faithful, man being put through terrible suffering, and all because God

Copyright the State Library of NSW

has a bet with Satan (seriously) over Job’s soul. Pointing out that Job is only good because he has an easy life, Satan gets God to agree that Satan can test Job’s faith by piling calamities on him. ‘ “All right, the Lord said to Satan, “everything he has is in your power, but you must not hurt Job himself.”’ (Job 1, v 12, Good News Bible). Job comes through with flying colours (all the more amazing since Satan interprets ‘not hurting Job himself’ pretty loosely, killing his whole family and covering him with boils) and God wins the bet.

Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. For the English-speaking world at least, this is the great setting of the myth that grew round Dr Johannes Faust, a sinister alchemist and magician who lived in Germany in the early 16th Marlowe has Faustus offer the demon, Mephistopheles, his soul in exchange for 24 years in which he might

Live in all voluptuousness;

Having thee ever to attend on me;

To give me whatsoever I shall ask

To tell me whatsoever I demand,

To slay mine enemies, and aid my friends,

And always be obedient to my will.

(Doctor Faustus, Scene III)

Heady stuff – but you’d have to have tapioca for brains not to see that 24 years is hardly a good deal. Faustus fools himself by not really believing in damnation – ‘Come, I think hell’s a fable.’ (Doctor Faustus, Scene IV). Big mistake.

Goethe, Faust. The great 18th century German poet and dramatist took the Faust story and rooted it firmly in the Book of Job, making Faust’s soul the stake of a wager between God and Mephistopheles. Faust has a thirst for knowledge, a scientific curiosity impossible to satisfy because there are more secrets in the universe than he can ever discover. Mephistopheles promises to fulfil his every wish in return for his soul; but just as God bets the demon that Faust will ultimately return to Him, so Faust bets Mephistopheles that the demon can’t win his soul because Faust knows he will never be satisfied:

In league with the devil, Faust now enjoys himself immensely and does some terrible things but his mind remains ever restless, striving to know and experience more. And paradoxically, it is this striving that saves him in the end because ‘Whoever strives,’ say the angels, ‘can be redeemed.’ Faust II, Line 11936

Adalbert von Chamisso, Peter Schlemihl. This children’s story written in 1814 adds a new twist: Peter Schlemihl sells the devil not his soul, but his shadow, in return for a bottomless wallet. The loss of his shadow makes Peter an outcast but when the devil offers to return the shadow in exchange for his soul, Peter is wise enough to resist him.

The Devil and Homer Simpson (Treehouse of Horror IV). OK, not literature as such but how could I not include Homer selling his soul to the devil in exchange for a doughnut? Fortunately for Homer it turns out that his soul wasn’t his to sell in the first place, having given it away to Marge on their wedding day. Ahhhhhhhh.

From the sublime to the ridiculous – but then folk legend has always been packed with stories of simple people tricking the devil. And what unites Homer Simpson, Faust, Schlemiel and all those colourful literary characters who bargain with the devil is an urgent need they can find no other way of meeting. So when plotting my children’s version of the Faust story, The Tragickall History of Henry Fowst, the one question I had to answer was, what great need would drive 13 year-old Henry Fowst – and his 16th century counterpart, 12 year-old John Striven – to make a pact with a demon?

Not necessarily, according to the Elizabethans. For them, magic wasn’t always a bad thing. Witches, curses and evil spells – yes, these were terrible and people feared their power.

But there was also a belief in a good kind of magic flowing through all creation, whose very existence – being a miracle brought about by God – was somehow magical. This magic was present in all nature – in stones, herbs, animal bones, the stars, geometrical shapes – and, with the help of various charms, you could unlock it and so discover the secrets of the universe.

Or you could enlist the aid of one of the thousands of spirits who were also part of God’s creation. A number of natural philosophers – the precursors of scientists – saw nothing irrational in this. The famous mathematician and astrologer, Dr John Dee – thought to be the inspiration for Shakespeare’s benign magician, Prospero, in The Tempest – created tables of ‘angelic codes’ and used a crystal ball, through which he believed the archangel Uriel spoke to him. In short, he called up ‘good spirits’ to help him in his scientific enquiries.

Crystal ball for skrying. Museum of the History of Science, Oxford.

And there I had it. If a great mathematician like Dr Dee could call on the aid of ‘good spirits’, then why shouldn’t my 12 year-old Elizabethan boy, John Striven, do the same?

It is unfortunate, for John, and for Henry 430 years later, that the spirit who arrives is…